James Corbett – The Corbett Report – The Criminalization Of Cash – 15 April 2015

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Louisiana has moved to criminalize cash! That’s right, as you may have read on anynumberofwebsites this week, Louisiana’s state legislature has passed House Bill 195, which reads in part:

“A secondhand dealer shall not enter into any cash transactions in payment for the purchase of junk or used or secondhand property. Payment shall be made in the form of check, electronic transfers, or money order issued to the seller of the junk or used or secondhand property and made payable to the name and address of the seller.”

If this story seems familiar to you, then congratulations; you were probably paying attention when the bill was actually passed back in 2011. That’s right, in another example of that strange internet phenomenon by which a very old “news” story gets picked up as new news by one website and then copy-pasted around the internet, it looks like Louisiana’s anti-cash secondhand goods law just got recycled (appropriately enough) as a secondhand news story.

And why not? The story itself may be old, but it is part of an unfolding agenda to create a cashless society, an agenda that continues to this very day.

How about when children’s game manufacturers started pumping out cashless versions of the Game of Life, Monopoly and other classics? Or when companies like IBM started pimping their vision of a cashless future in TV advertisements?

Or perhaps you’ve noticed that cash is getting increasingly more difficult to withdraw or even deposit into your bank account?

Of course, there are many reasons presented as to why we need to transition into a cashless society. Cash is only used by criminals and terrorists, after all (just ask the government of France or the FBI or Amtrak or, presumably, the authors of House Bill 195 in Louisiana). Cash carries germs. Cash is so, like, 20th century.

This is hogwash and propaganda, of course. As various sites pointed out with regard to the Louisiana story, the government moving to ban cash is a further encroachment on property rights and due process. It is also a move that disproportionately hurts the poor, who often have less access to banking services or credit/debit instruments. But perhaps more to the point, the future cashless society that the social engineers are trying to bring in is a world of total government surveillance. The government is already reading your emails and listening to your phone calls. Do you really want them correlating all of that data with the record of everything you ever purchase, and to keep all of that on file for the rest of eternity? No, I thought not.

So what is the answer to this mess? Certainly not government regulation. In fact, there is no reason the government should be involved with the money supply at all, either issuing it, regulating it, or outlawing it. Do you really want the government to be able to stop you from using their central bank funny money fiat paper (or any other form of currency) to buy a table lamp at a garage sale? Where and how did they get the authority to step in between the two people making that transaction? And if they don’t have that authority, why would we cede it to them by sheepishly complying with these edicts?

Thankfully, there are indications here and there that the people, when given a choice, will opt to go for cash transactions and human interaction. Let’s see if we can push that inclination to its logical conclusion by shunning the government-issued colored paper altogether and transacting with alternative and complementary currencies as much as possible.